wide sargasso sea + racism

Truthfully, I’m getting a little tired of writing reflections on every single book I read this summer. I should probably quit while I’m ahead, because chances are you (whoever ‘you’ are, if ‘you’ haven’t abandoned ship yet) are tired of reading reflections on every single book I read.

But I need to remember to keep thinking while I read, so too bad. Too bad for all of us. Alas.

Anyway, the next book I have to discuss conveniently relates to actual current events (whaaattt). Wide Sargasso Sea is one of those multitudinous and sundry offerings of 20th century British women writers… in this case, of a 20th century Caribbean-born, part-British-part-Creole woman (Jean Rhys).

This is the book about the Madwoman in the Attic. This is the story of Bertha Rochester, before she burns down Thornfield Hall and blinds the man who married her and then locked her away so he could flirt with Jane Eyre. (Spoiler warning, whoops.)

This is the book about the life of a post-William-Wilberforce ‘white negro,’ torn between two cultures and two colors. This is the book about how she is molded, pruned, and otherwise trained into insanity because she lives in neither one world nor the other, and people know that, and people hate that. She isn’t white enough for her husband or black enough for her childhood friends. And people hate that. And people hate her.

Before the verdict, I heard a bajillion different opinions on the Trayvon Martin case. And by ‘bajillion,’ I mean ‘two.’

1. Zimmerman will be acquitted because the jury is 85% white women, and white women are afraid of black men. Therefore they’ll give him the benefit of being so afraid of this black kid with Skittles that he chased him down and put himself in a position where self-defense had been excluded by his own stupidity and prejudice. And this proves that racism is still alive and thriving in the US. Pooh-pooh on you, legal system.
2. Zimmerman will be hung because the jury will not want to look racist, and the verdict must always (politically correctly) favor the black man, regardless of whether the evidence shows that he was being beaten up when he shot. And this proves that racism is still alive and thriving backwards from normal in the US. Like affirmative action, but in the courtroom, which is WRONG.

Well, I think that this is all a bunch of baloney. It doesn’t even deserve a proper spelling of that mysterious meat-product.

Because… whichever way the verdict went, it proves racism.

It proves that we make decisions based on the color of people’s skin.

It proves that we keep associations depending on white and black.

It proves that culture and personality are ascribed to you by virtue of melanin.

WELL OF COURSE. That happens. We know that. And we know that this is wrong. I would say that neither outcome of the case can be definitively proven to be the result of racism… which, I think, is okay, because we already know that racism is a thing that happens. And we know that it is evil. We don’t need a trial to prove it.

The Trayvon Martin case did not have a racist potential ending (evil) and a non-racist potential ending (good). Both were pretty bad.

Because what happened was bad.

And the solution is not to hate the people of another race. It’s not even to hate the personality traits unjustly attributed to that other race. Otherwise, we end up with children like the young Bertha/Antoinette being driven away like a ‘white cockroach.’ We want to separate ourselves from all that is shameful and then shame it, whatever our value system declares that to be. 

And so we mold, prune, and train both ourselves and the people around us into paranoid insanity, incapable of loving or thinking ourselves loved. Because in that sort of world, that’s probably true.


Note: I may have just stuck both feet in my mouth. Or else said nothing at all useful. If so, I apologize.